Don’t Believe Everything You Read on the Internet

Last week, a story broke through the entire Internet at blazing-fast speeds, and at first, most anyone who caught wind of it believed it. After all, it wasn’t that hard to accept. Of course, I’m talking about Jenny, the girl to quit her job via way of taking pictures of herself holding a dry erase board filled with different ramblings.

By day, the story seemed to be nothing more than someone who quit their job in one of the coolest ways possible. But by evening, the truth came out… the entire story was a hoax. There was no “Jenny” who quit her job, and no “boss” who played Farmville for near twenty hours a week. So what’s the deal?

The site which created the story, The Chive, understands what it means to get a story viral, and all aspects of this one almost guaranteed that to happen. Over the course of the first two days of the story being published, the traffic for the site sky-rocketed to almost 15x. Hoax or not, it’s hard to fault a website that can create a feat quite like that.

Stories like these, as innocent as they may be, do prove that people will believe almost anything that they see on the Internet… at least at first. I actually didn’t, but that’s only because I saw news that the story was fake ever before I even saw of the original. But, I am highly doubtful I would have discredited the information. After all… why? It’s not as though it’s not believable. It’s not as though she claimed to jump and almost touch the moon.

But, while stories like this may be innocent, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t easily fall for a story that’s a little more serious. Last week, I spotted a trending topic at Twitter that said Bill Cosby was dead. After a quick visit to a couple news sites, I saw that it was merely a hoax. It turns out that the same hoax has been pulled multiple times, which in itself is strange.

The moral of the story? Don’t immediately believe everything you see on the Internet!

Jenny’s story, which many people wanted to believe, was posted on theChive at 4:30 AM. The site claimed they got the photos from someone who works with Jenny, but they even admitted Jenny’s name was not confirmed. It was then re-posted at College Humor, and by many others including TechCrunch, on which Jenny had claimed her boss spent 5.3 hours a week reading. Really just bait for us to run the story.